Sabzi week 9!!
Salam hamegi! Hello everyone,
Story time!
I'm sitting at home right now and the storm wind is raging through the trees on the street. Doesn't it feel like summer is winding down? My body is getting ready to settle into the framework of an autumn that I have built for myself this season. It's approaching reap-what-you-sowed time. What you sowed, watered, transplanted, fussed over, weeded, harvested, and let go to seed time.
The end of summer for those of us in California often spells out some variety of apocalypse as the season comes to a fiery head. We're seeing upsetting climate news everywhere. I think about youth who are within a decade of my age but have had a profoundly different understanding of their environment than I have, one that is often in duress and impacting their health and safety. One that breaks record heat and drought and flood and burn every year.
In this slow apocalypse, I guess I decided to start a farm. One might argue that the timing is bad and things are too tumultuous to enter a field where your livelihood is dependent on weather and climate change and unpredictability. However, if we stay on this trajectory, then the time has never been better (because it's only going to get worse). And in that future, would you rather have sabzi that is adapted to all of this mess? Or sabzi seeds sitting in a closet waiting for a better time?
Thankfully, the farm has been safe thus far (bezanam be takhteh*). I am, however, beginning to feel the emotional strain of doing this difficult project for the first time and I'm looking forward to having a break in September. I'm grateful to still be in good health (another takhteh-zan** for good measure), but little Memo was having some health problems in this last week that were physically taxing on him and emotionally taxing on me.
Here's him resting now in his silly little cone that wobbles up and down when he walks:
I promise I'm working on ways to make sabzi more accessible in the Bay Area next year. :)
Be omide didar,
Farmer Sama <3
* knock on wood
** wood-knock
This entry was originally submitted on 8/21/23
